A “budget” option
Monday is a bank holiday, the holiday of Washington and FDR and Trump and the fellow buried in Grant’s tomb, who might be my favorite of them all because he was the best writer. (The criterion isn’t so ludicrous. Whenever I see informal polls about the greatest [U.S.] Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers get lots of votes, and I often catch myself thinking of writers first – especially, Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain – not so much because of what they did or stood for, though that also matters, but because of how they wrote.) Anyway, today, Karin worked her last shift in a good while. She expects to be on maternity leave through March – which isn’t a paid leave, she keeps having to tell people who assume otherwise. It’ll be good to have her at home. It’ll be good, though not so pleasant, to live more frugally.
Speaking of frugality.
I’d known about the Cambridge Elements book series, but I hadn’t known that so, so many of those books are free to download (some only temporarily).
Most are shorter than 100 pages. They all try to painlessly introduce the reader to important recent scholarship.
This webpage states the series’s goals and subject categories, and this one lists the titles in reverse publication order. You can see which books are currently free by ticking a box on the left.
I can vouch for this author, a professor of whom I was fond. Is he the world’s leading free-will philosopher? Maybe. Does he believe in free will? No; he comes as close to believing as one can do while disbelieving, which is cheeky. Does he believe in moral responsibility? Not if it should require free will; but he is open to revising the concept so that a person can be held responsible even if she isn’t free. Is he a religious believer? Yes. He is a Calvinist. But his main arguments don’t presuppose much, or anything, by way of doctrine. But whatever you think of his position, the point of reading this book is to get an overview of the recent secular literature, and so it is valuable.
Is he a great writer and therefore a great (U.S.) American? I should say not; he was born in the Netherlands, and as for his identification with this side of the pond, I believe that when he wrote his most famous book he was merely a Canadian.
His Cambridge Elements book is free to download through February 23.
Speaking of frugality.
I’d known about the Cambridge Elements book series, but I hadn’t known that so, so many of those books are free to download (some only temporarily).
Most are shorter than 100 pages. They all try to painlessly introduce the reader to important recent scholarship.
This webpage states the series’s goals and subject categories, and this one lists the titles in reverse publication order. You can see which books are currently free by ticking a box on the left.
I can vouch for this author, a professor of whom I was fond. Is he the world’s leading free-will philosopher? Maybe. Does he believe in free will? No; he comes as close to believing as one can do while disbelieving, which is cheeky. Does he believe in moral responsibility? Not if it should require free will; but he is open to revising the concept so that a person can be held responsible even if she isn’t free. Is he a religious believer? Yes. He is a Calvinist. But his main arguments don’t presuppose much, or anything, by way of doctrine. But whatever you think of his position, the point of reading this book is to get an overview of the recent secular literature, and so it is valuable.
Is he a great writer and therefore a great (U.S.) American? I should say not; he was born in the Netherlands, and as for his identification with this side of the pond, I believe that when he wrote his most famous book he was merely a Canadian.
His Cambridge Elements book is free to download through February 23.